Lets make an effort to understand her magic and (better yet) keep it alive. I loved this book it’s a book I will revisit and a book I will encourage others to read because despite increasing decline and modernisation, the natural world is still on our doorstep: she is still there if we are willing to look and to appreciate her. Sure, there might be reserves, or isolated pockets, but I think one day there will be nothing natural left about modern life (if there is, indeed, anything natural about it now.) I wonder if the only way people can learn about the natural world is through books rather than observing her directly. I wonder what the world will be like in fifty years. I write these words as our green spaces are reducing, as more land is given over to housing and native animal populations plummet even further and perhaps even into memory itself. It’s educational it’s a book we should give to our children and to our adults to help them see the sense of wonder that is outside, and its captured perfectly though the power of words and the beautiful illustrations.

The Lost Spells is a celebration of the natural it is a collection of prose poetry about foxes and trees and birds and rabbits and flowers: it is an elegy to what we are losing and what we must try to retain. In 2017 he was awarded the EM Forster Prize for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has collaborated with artists, film-makers, actors, photographers and musicians, including Hauschka, Willem Dafoe, Karine Polwart and Stanley Donwood.

His work has been translated into many languages, won prizes around the world, and his books have been widely adapted for film, television, stage and radio. Robert Macfarlane is the author of prize-winning and bestselling books about landscape, nature, people and place, including Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (2003), The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012), Holloway (2013, with Stanley Donwood and Dan Richards), Landmarks (2015), The Lost Words: A Spell Book (with the artist Jackie Morris, 2017) and Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019). Robert Macfarlane is a British nature writer and literary critic.Įducated at Nottingham High School, Pembroke College, Cambridge and Magdalen College, Oxford, he is currently a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and teaches in the Faculty of English at Cambridge.

The lost spells by robert macfarlane